Undoubtedly one of the main reasons why traders fail is as a result of unrealistic expectations. This is not necessarily the fault of the traders so much as the industry that supplies them with educational products and trading systems.
The vast majority of websites supplying traders are run by marketing men, rather than real life traders, with the sole intention of making as many sales as possible. The claims made on those websites are designed solely to part the unwary from their cash rather than to provide any genuine or insightful information that could be used to build a real career in trading.
One of the biggest problems new traders struggle to understand is the lack of consistency of returns. We are all searching for that mythical rock steady 100 pips per week trading method which simply churns out a nice steady wage every week of 100 pips. Sadly that does not happen in real life. It is not that we cannot average 100 pips per week (because we most certainly can and indeed very much more) it is that we cannot consistently make 100 pips each and every single week. Often traders come into this business expecting to earn a regular weekly wage exactly as they did in their previous employment. That is not how it is – unless you are a high frequency trader with millions of Dollars of technology helping you.
Trading is a real business and the way profits unfold in most business is often inconsistent and almost always with less consistency than the wages that are paid to the employees. The analogy I like to give is that trading is a bit like being the owner of an ice cream van. In August you have queues at mile long and are coining more money than you can count whilst in December you may have no customers at all and are sitting in the back of the van freezing cold reading the Sun newspaper all day long !. Trading absolutely is like that, sometimes the markets gives you much more money than Frankly you deserve whilst at other times you can work very hard and get no reward at all. On average you may do very well but results for any particular day can be more or less the toss of a coin.
The lack of consistency in trading can be overcome to a great extent by applying the specific methods taught on both our beginners intermediates course and the automated trading course but the truth is that we have to accept taht the variability of returns day on day or week on week will always be greater than we would ideally like.
The second point that normally surprises new traders is that exceptional returns generally require exceptional risks. Again this is not what the marketing men would have you believe. They would say that you can start with $1,000 and turn it into $50,000 in a matter of months with little or no risk. The truth is many many more traders have started with $1000 and turned it into nothing in a matter of months than have pocketed 50 grand ! . It is not that it is impossible to make staggeringly large returns in this game, far from it, indeed people are achieving such feats every single day. Where the error in the understanding occurs is that new traders believe this can be achieved without assuming any commensurate risk. That is not the case. Yes you can make truly astounding sums of money trading Forex and futures in very very short periods of time indeed but you do have to be very aggressive to achieve this and also prepared to accept the losses that can come from such actions. The way in which you choose to compound up your capital is absolutely critical to your chances of success. On both the beginners intermediates training course and the auto trading course I teach you several different position sizing techniques from the relatively cautious to the super aggressive day traders techniques that really can compound up your capital faster than you can imagine.
So for both consistency of returns and speed of capital appreciation it is not that the claims that you read about cannot possibly be accomplished it is that in order to achieve either you have to be approaching the problem from a completely different, much more fully informed, perspective that comes only from a lifetimes study or having received a full and complete quality education from traders rather than marketers.
Most courses choose to gloss over both the difficulties and the risks inherent in trading as these of course do not sell courses. The problem is if they send you away without you fully understanding either or both of these then your chances of success are very much reduced.
The pro-trader courses really are different, they are specifically designed to both inform and educate and provide participators with a full complete and honest understanding of what is required to succeed in this business.
Having this approach to business certainly means that we lose lots of sales and indeed turn many others away but it does mean that those that attend the courses have a much greater chance of success than those that simply attend marketing men’s get rich quick seminars. It also means because we tell you the truth that we can sleep nights – which is a bonus for us !